PG on startups (again).
Paul Graham, in the middle of Hiring is Obsolete, casually offers a great little analogy he calls “The Open Cage”:
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they
don’t always realize at first that the door’s open? Often they
have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar
happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in
1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple
years. In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled
to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank.
Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants
to do it, even print journalists. But blogging has not taken off
recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight
years for everyone to realize the cage was open.